What is the literary zeitgeist of our age...

yeah i mean of course they have to have some timeless themes and shit otherwise no one but historians would still wanna read it, but those themes are filtered through the spirit of their time, and the personal experience of the author...i'm not big on obsessing over author's biographies like "oh clearly the character in chapter three is based on his aunt was a real bitch" etc. that's not relevant to the text really, but i just mean if the dude was in a war or was a big commie or was a fag or something it's going to influence the work as well

No, I was going for something else here. The situation you describe is that we are having a cultural shift and then comes along the author and captures it. So, what if the reality is the reverse? The author is the one who created the shift. Guys like Goethe and Dante came to mind, who pretty much started romanticism and humanism/renaissance in literature. But then I remember that the shift in both cases was already ongoing, with plenty of preromanticist writers (Ossian, Rousseau) and dolce stil nuovo in Italy that Dante came from. So yeah, they didn't spring out of nowhere.

Still, I'm not quite sure how to position Cervantes, Shakespeare or Melville in this framework.

shakespeare built off other writers of the time, he didn't do it in a vacuum, and if you look at the kjv bible there was clearly plenty of dank shit going on, not big on theater so maybe a shakespearologist can answer this but did he really create all of those new words personally or were those just widely used slang and he was the first to be in a position to use them in recorded text?

Nick Smith

I wonder so too. At times i had been sitting at the oceans edge and fumbed with the water and my thoughts and waved my legs in slow motion casting shadows in the giant liquid in front of me and i wondered and thought whether maybe our time was over now. I said that out loud, i said: Our time is over now and then a hand touched my shoulder and i got goosebumps and it was a frank but friendly nigger who asked me for directions and i sat as i did before but stared at him.

"Who are you"
"I'm Nigga Falonee"
"What are you doing out here, at the ocean, Nigga Fallonee?"
"It's falonee yo"
"I apologize"
"It's okay wrhite brother, we live in times of separation and internal and external struggle. What is important is to remember that what unites us is our feeling for righteousness. I can sense it from the way you speak that just like nigga falonee who is me you are driven by hatred for this world that you are driven by will of world negation. So oyu see, you can be a nigga like falonee who is me is, you can be a white wannabe artist like you you can be a radicalist islamist or a indian hindunationalist we are all connected by ourz hatred of the injustice of modernity, or are we not my paleskinned whitebread?"
Whilte this nigger was taking i had long ago lightened my joint and was not paying much attention. I was catching some ofthat talk and had to laugh half half cough and said: Dude... hahahahhaah dude." I was thinking about that part where he called me a wannabe artist and felt like: Damn hahahahhahahaha that's so me. I was really laughin hard and Nigga Fellatio was eyeing me with radical bakunian hatred and desire fro true anarchist individualism but i was uncautious and fell into the ocean who swallomed me just like that, my figure diseappearing fairly quickly from the eyes of stars and the sun. In the sea there were seaweeds and planktons but also fish and spongebob squarepants was there too and he was playing chess with his best friend patrick except the two were playing coop, trying to dismantle the other colour. I joined them and took over the part of the blacks in that chess game and assessed the situation.

After that had occured and i swam to new york and dried my clothes and kissed my wife on her cheeks and then sat in my study and read thomas Bernhard and figured that he was literally me i then ate some cherry pie whatever that is and went up an elevator to some next stage of being where my grandfather greeeted me wearing an undersized bathing gown that was fairly explicit and also my aunt who had a loose vagina though that had been explicit nt now but at other times which are unfavourable for public naration and there they said hello t om e and asked how things had been and i sat down quietly and eyed them.

"Things have been a great disappointment. May i say that? I had great hopes but i'm finding that i'm on the edge of no control. I am very much confused. I am very much confused. I am very much confused. I am very much confused. I am

It's not about the words, though, it's about the style and ideas. How did Hamlet's "to be or not to be" capture the zeitgeist, that's what I'm wondering about. We don't need theatrology here, we need history.

Themes should be discussed, not words

OP,
I don't think there is one, and I think the world is too fractured for one to exist. Consider that the Internet and all globalist trends give every single person a nearly equal voice, save for corporations, although the voices of corporations are generally dismissed by people of intellectual or literary merit. I think this lets every single person surround themselves with a relatively homogenous community - each community has its own very unique form of customs and standards and values, each praises different things, and most aren't concerned at all with serious writng.

Take some example like the other user provided, like Dante, or even Hemingway for the "lost generation". Or mark twain. Or fuckin Einstein. These people became household names (to a certain extent), and you could discuss their ideas and style and merit with your neighbors or /real life friends/.

But at this point in time, at least in the developed West, those conversations aren't really possible anymore, at least from my experiences and perspective. Now, we congregate on places like Veeky Forums, and have our own very specific customs and values. These values vary even from board to board on Veeky Forums - they vary so much more when you consider all the forums and Facebook groups and whatever else is out there.

And since people are constantly reaffirming their views in these homogenous communities, they are violent towards the out groups! There's no real discussion on merit.

Because of this, how could there be a unifying work of literature, or one that accurately depicted or represented all those little worlds, that still took the form of a BOOK? The written word is too limited to capture what's going on right now, IMO.

Maybe you have a different view, or maybe I'm talking out my ass, let me know.

I'm really appreciating your posts tonight user, what's got you going?

one of shakespeare fanboys claims to his fame are his innovation of words... it's worth discussing because no author ever has been able to getting away with making up a bunch of words and suddenly they are part of every day speech for the next 400 years, it's more significant than biting a refactoring a couple chaucer plots that he in turn jacked from boccacchio

Thats a fair point, I guess the question becomes did he take the words from the people and popularize them even more, or did he give them the words and they began to love them

I don't know much about Shakespeares actual life and times perhaps someone can chime in

>the zeitgeist of year 1600 was captured with the invention of words such as "eyelid" and "green-eyed monster" as a personification of jealousy in one specific language
>Shakespeare's narratives don't matter because he just copied them from someone else

so you think bocachio's narratives caught the spirit of the 1600s when he wrote them in the 1300s? that's one neat trick

did the kjv bible catch the spirit of the 1600s? how?

Please write a book and share it with us

Well then I guess you proved OP wrong where I couldn't. Congrats

Hello?

The 21st century is the century of the cuck. We don't DO anything anymore, we just watch. There are no risks anymore, therefore there are no heroes. The only dangers are absurd, like accidentally falling from a cliff while taking a selfie, or destroying the environment.

there are plenty of heroes but since we're still in the middle of the age of resentment you hate them instead of being inspired by them

Name some heroes.

money

anyone i name you'll hate, pointless exercise ... you've been (((tricked))) into hating your heroes and worshipping sloth

Lol what BS

...

I enjoyed Sam Pink will I enjoy that?

Bump

the internet is the second industrial revolution, and it hasnt even begun. The very nature of the nation state is probably going to be radically redefined since a global society is inevitable at this point.

Speak for yourself, cuck. You're the one watching.

Fanfiction.